From Draft NOtices, July-September 2006
— Callie Wight
Sara Rich wore her thick, remarkably red hair in a long braid down her back for decades. Just a few days ago she cut it all off. A luxurious twelve-inch braid will now be donated to Locks of Love. When I interviewed Sara and asked why she did it, she said, “For my daughter, Suzanne.”
Sara Rich is the mother of Suzanne Swift, a 21-year-old Army specialist who served with the 66th Military Police Company in Iraq. She had already served one tour, driving a Humvee for combat patrols in Karbala. She had returned to Fort Lewis, Washington, for what the military refers to as “stabilization time”, a period that is supposed to be 18 months long. But she didn’t make that 18 months. She went AWOL last year.
What is it that drove Suzanne Swift to refuse to return to the battle zones of Iraq for a second tour? Why did her mother, Sara Rich, feel compelled to shear herself of her remarkable hair in order to do battle for her daughter?
Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft (COMD)
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2006
— Pat Elder
The pressure is on. You’ve got a lot of things you want to do in your life and all too often, you’re going to have to pass a test to get what you want.
High school students across the country are greeted with this message when they log on to the March2Success.com Web site hosted by the U.S. Army. March2Success, a popular, Web-based, 30-hour course designed by Educational Options, The Princeton Review, and Kaplan, Inc., is ostensibly a program that provides training in test-taking strategies and problem-solving skills and teaches students how to improve their math and English knowledge.
The program, however, is actually a thinly veiled military recruiting tool. Like the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) and the Junior Reserve Officer's Training Corps (JROTC), two widely prevalent programs in the nation's high schools, March2Success is about recruiting for the armed forces.
The Army freely admits there are several advantages to providing this online service to students. First, it drives traffic to the Army’s recruiting Web site, www.goarmy.com, and generates leads for recruiters to pursue. Students are prompted to indicate if they want to be contacted by a recruiter; Army graphics and propaganda are omnipresent. March2Success offers a state-of-the-art product to schools and students who rarely have access to free online instruction. The program helps to strengthen the relationship between Army recruiters and school staff. After all, school "penetration" and "ownership" are cited in military manuals as tasks for all school-based recruiters.
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Why COMD Opposes the California Military Recruiting Opt-out Bill
From Draft NOtices, July-September 2006
At the time of this writing in early July, California Assembly Bill 1778 had passed the full state assembly, been approved by the senate education committee, and was on its way to a final vote this summer in the full senate.
AB 1778 says that if a school district collects emergency information for its high school students, the information card must include a notice that informs the parent or legal guardian and pupil of her or his right to request that the student’s name, address and phone number not be released to military recruiters or institutions of higher education. (The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 has made it mandatory for schools to release this information unless a student or parent has opted out.)
Ninth CIRCUIT COURT RULING: CONFRONTING MILITARISM BY USING EQUAL ACCESS TO HIGH SCHOOLS
When the military comes to your local high school, you have a legal right to give students an opposing view. This has been the position taken by federal district courts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Illinois and two federal appellate courts. The most broadly-worded decision came from a case that COMD took to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in the 1980s. Here is the background:
